People have used bodybuilding to improve their physical performance for at least 1,500 years. The first recorded example was the sixth-century wrestler, Milo of Croton, in southern Italy. Milo reportedly…

How much of an ice bath is a placebo?
Andreas Nilsson/FlickrNovember 21, 2014

Whether an athlete has endured the repeated joint stresses of a marathon run, or the relentless battery of hits during a football match, many will opt for a post-activity polar plunge into an ice-cold…

Steroid use is growing in Australia but not among the usual suspects.
Jhong Dizon/FlickrSeptember 2, 2014

Steroids are easy to scapegoat. Users are viewed as aggressive, violent and mentally unstable, able to snap at any moment and cause great harm to the people around them. Ostensibly, it is this perception…

Sometimes in research the answer is right under your nose. In our case, we spent nearly two decades developing exotic materials as artificial muscles – to now show in a paper published in Science today…

“Muscle memory” is a frequently used term to describe the learning of motor skills, be they sport, music, or everyday activity. But interestingly, despite the widespread usage of the term, controversy…

Having legs with the right type of muscle fibre can make all the difference.
Yoan Valat/EPAJuly 8, 2013

Cyclists in this year’s Tour de France – currently underway – will cover more than 3,300km over 21 stages in 23 days. Of course, due to the extreme physical exertion required to do this at speed, many…

A reconstruction of a ptyctodontid fish, one of the groups of placoderms studied from which well-preserved muscles were found.
John A LongJune 13, 2013

Fossilised soft tissues, such as skin and muscle, are exceptionally hard to come by. When you think the chances of an animal being fossilised is less than one in a million - and these usually have only…